“Ready?” Duncan asked, and when I nodded he stepped out in front of me, his stride purposeful. I followed him closely, trying to ignore the icy wetness of the ankle-high grass.
It took us less than ten minutes to reach the place where the attack had occurred, and as we had expected, it was a seething hive of people, most of whom had no reason to be there, other than simple curiosity and the human need to gawk. The ground had been churned to mud, as we had expected, and there was no hope of being able to make sense of what had happened there after the events of the early morning. We merely looked about us briefly and moved on, ignoring the throng and focusing instead on finding the tracks of the people who had passed this way earlier in the day.
It was not difficult to find the route they had taken, but it was surprisingly difficult to escape from the depredations of the gawkers who had since added their own tracks to those left behind by the attackers. Many of them had struck out boldly to follow the original tracks and had stayed with them for a surprisingly long time, so that Duncan and I, following in turn, had no way of knowing whether we were following the footprints of the attackers or the amateur hunters who had preceded us. Small groups occasionally came straggling back towards us after giving up the hunt, and it was all I could do to maintain a semblance of civility towards them, but the last of them revealed that there was only one more group ahead of us, three men, none of whom they had recognized.
We had emerged from behind a screen of head-high bushes to find ourselves in a small, open glade surrounded by waist-high undergrowth. I was walking with my head down, studying the ground at my feet, and I sensed rather than saw a flicker of movement very close to me. I raised my head in time to see a long, broad sword blade come hissing towards me and stop within a hand’s breadth of my face. I froze. Duncan, half a pace to my left, stopped, too, his hands flung up involuntarily against the threat, his eyes flaring.
The man wielding the sword was tall and lean, his body solid beneath his sodden clothing. But my attention had already been caught by a second man, behind him.
“Hold, Shoomy!” he shouted, and I recognized him instantly. As the man lowered his blade and stepped back, the other continued, “What are you two doing here?”
“Will?” I asked, hearing the bleating disbelief in my voice. “Is that you?”
The image of a hugely bedraggled rat came to me immediately, suggested by the sodden sleekness of his clothes, literally aflow with running water as they clung to his enormous frame. I was seeing him clean shaven for the first time, and the water streamed down his cheeks. I could see that he was bristling with fury, too, but my powers of perception were addled at that moment and so I understood nothing.
“Aye, Jamie, it’s me, right enough. You didn’t answer. What are you two doing out here?”
As he spoke, a third man, short and slight as the first was tall, stepped out of the bushes, lowering his crossbow. I recognized him as Big Andrew Miller, though I had not seen him for years.
“We’re looking for signs of who might have … have done this … this …” I began again. “Some women were attacked this morning, in Paisley, on their way to Mass. We set out to find some sign of who had done it, but we’ve had to come this far searching for clear tracks.”
“Aye, and good luck. There are no clear tracks. Muck-filled holes, but no tracks that can be used, even were this accursed rain to stop this minute.”
“You know about the women? But … Where have you come from, Will? What are you doing here?”
The look he threw at me was one that I had never seen before, a mixture of scorn and intolerance. But he answered me civilly enough. “I was on my way home, bringing my wife to Elderslie to pay you all a visit. But when we came to Paisley early this morning, we found the place in an uproar.”
“Aye, those women.”
He glared at me. “What d’you mean, those women? D’you not know who they were?”
He could not have asked me anything more mystifying, and I shook my head.
“They were my women, Jamie! Mine!” His voice, the outrage in it, hit me almost palpably in the chest. “Mirren’s aunt and her four cousins. That’s who those women were.”
“Holy Mother of God!”
My lips continued to move, but nothing more emerged, and Will paid no attention anyway. He spoke almost to himself.
“They were taken unawares on their way to worship God, and they were ravaged by devils. Even the old wife, Mirren’s aunt. Two of them were killed on the spot, the others left for dead.”
“Which of them were killed?”